Opening any settings page resets displays

[Ursula Junque]

Most times when I open, for example, sound settings (from the indicator menu or from the dash), my display configuration resets and all my monitors are turned off, leaving only the laptop screen on, as if I went to display settings and choose to turn off both monitors. If I click in "Detect Displays", the previous configuration is restored automatically.

Also, every time I spend enough time away from the computer and the displays turn off, when I come back only the laptop display is on. I have to open display settings and it automatically sets back to what it was before, I don't even need to click on "Detect Displays" in this case.

Note 1: When I'm normally using the computer and I open the settings and get this error, if I close it and open another settings in the next 10 minutes or so the problem doesn't happen.

Note 2: This problem doesn't happen if I merely lock the screen. It needs to become idle and the displays to turn off (it seems).

So it seems Ubuntu is having a hard time to remember my display settings, and it seems to load this wrong default every time any settings are called, causing the displays to turn off.

I have a X220 in a minidock, with two monitors plugged in the DVI ports. The configuration resets most times I open any settings, and this happens whether I'm with both monitors on and laptop display off, or only one monitor and the laptop display both on.
---
ApportVersion: 2.12.5-0ubuntu2
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-05-27 (138 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release i386 (20130213)
MarkForUpload: True
Package: gnome-control-center 1:3.6.3-0ubuntu43
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.11.0-9.16-generic 3.11.2
Tags: saucy
Uname: Linux 3.11.0-9-generic i686
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to saucy on 2013-07-29 (76 days ago)
UserGroups: adm audio cdrom dialout dip fuse libvirtd lpadmin netdev plugdev sambashare scanner sudo vboxusers video
usr_lib_gnome-control-center:
 activity-log-manager 0.9.7-0ubuntu4
 deja-dup 27.3.1-0ubuntu1
 gnome-control-center-datetime 13.10.0+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1
 gnome-control-center-signon 0.1.7~+13.10.20130724.1-0ubuntu1
 gnome-control-center-unity 1.3+13.10.20131004-0ubuntu1

[Ursula Junque (ursinha)]

apport information

[Ursula Junque (ursinha)]

apport information

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. That seems like a gnome-settings-daemon issue ... do you get any error in ~/.cache/upstart/gnome-settings-daemon.log? What video driver do you use?

[Ursula Junque (ursinha)]

Hi Seb, my video driver is intel (xserver-xorg-video-intel), and this problem might be related to bug 1239186. I'm not sure though.

The weird thing is that the displays reset whenever I access any of the ubuntu settings, so maybe it's a bug in my driver combined with some odd behavior in gnome settings. Here are the contents of gnome-settings-daemon.log: http://paste.ubuntu.com/6290019/ .

Please, let me know if there's anything I could do to test it.

Thanks!

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Do you get the issue in a guest session?

Could you also run "gnome-settings-daemon --debug -r", reproduce the bug and see what is written in the output when that happens?

It would be interesting to have the output of "xrandr -q" and the content of ~/.config/monitors.xml